The idle musings of a former military man, former computer geek, medically retired pastor and now full-time writer. Contents guaranteed to offend the politically correct and anal-retentive from time to time. My approach to life is that it should be taken with a large helping of laughter, and sufficient firepower to keep it tamed!

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

WARNING - latest Windows update may cause problems

Obviously, one swallow doesn't make a summer, and one user's experience doesn't indicate a trend: but I installed the latest Windows updates this evening, and my computer went bonkers! Ultra-slow, buggy, stumbling . . . very bad news. I tried three or four fixes before giving up and restoring to a pre-update version of the operating system. I'm currently running Spybot, Ad-Aware and a few other utilities to make sure I didn't pick up anything nasty from somewhere else, but they're clean so far.

Just a word of caution to those of you who haven't yet installed the latest Windows updates; they may cause problems. Make sure you create a system restore point before you update!

I won't put more blog posts up tonight, until the update/re-update/system-check process is complete. Check back for more tomorrow morning.

Thanks OZ you beat me to it. I spend 8-12 hours a day as a EE on a windows box where I day-dream about my company switching to Linux. My Linux computers at home are FAST, clean, no annoying Microsoft updates. I do all the security updates though of course. With so many distros available, you'll find one with a setup that works for you or better yet build one yourself. Having to use the command line so much can occasionally be frustrating, but its usually quite liberating. I could go on and on, but I'm sure you've played with it before at some point. I think you'd really like using a GNU system like Trisquel. Windows seems to be a dying OS to me. When your CEO has to give millions upon millions to foreign nations to try to keep them from adopting the free/superior alternative, you know you're fighting a losing battle (Turkey and Pardus OS).

I started the latest Win 7 update at 11 p.m. last night. As of 6:30 a.m. it shows 8 of 12 updates done. This seems to be an excessively long time. It's apparently the computer, or the updates, as I'm on the laptop, using the wi-fi, so the HSI seems to be OK. If it's locked up, or something, what are my options?